Luring him in, she demands that he cannot leave her house
with the script:
"I couldn't let it out of my house. You'll have to finish it here." The aging
star suggests that he live in a room over the garage, and Max promptly shows
him the apartment where he will live - commenting strangely that he made the
room up for him earlier in the afternoon. The "slightly cuckoo" Max explains
how Norma was worshipped by fetishistic men in her heyday:

She was the greatest of them all. You wouldn't know. You are too
young. In one week, she received 17,000 fan letters. Men bribed her hairdresser
to get a lock of her hair. There was a Maharajah who came all the way from
India to beg one of her silk stockings. Later, he strangled himself with it.

He smartly replies: "I sure turned into an interesting driveway." As
Joe prepares for bed, he ponders his situation, and surveys the property
from the windows:

The whole place seemed to have been stricken with a kind of creeping
paralysis, out of beat with the rest of the world, crumbling apart in slow
motion. There was a tennis court, or rather the ghost of a tennis court, with
faded markings and a sagging net. And of course, she had a pool - who didn't
then. Mabel Normand and John Gilbert must have swum in it ten thousand midnights
ago, and Vilma Banky and Rod La Roque. It was empty now, or was it?

He spots rats fighting in the bottom of the empty pool for
a scrap of food. Then around midnight, he notices the serious ceremony
of the last rites and burial of the monkey: "as if she were laying to rest an only child. Was her
life really as empty as that? It was all very queer, but queerer things were
yet to come." Norma carries a two-candle candelabra, lighting the way for
Max to drop the casket into a hole dug into the turf.

Joe fails to recognize that he has become her new employee, lap dog, pet
gigolo, and replacement pet monkey, as he experiences an hallucinatory nightmare:

That night, I had a mixed-up dream. In it there was an organ grinder.
I couldn't see his face, but the organ was all draped in black, and a chimp
was dancing for pennies. When I opened my eyes, the music was still there...Where
was I? Oh yes, in that empty room over her garage.

When he awakens the next morning, he notices all his belongings
have been brought from his apartment to his garage room and wonders what
is going on. He finds out that bull-necked, music-making Max (his giant
white gloved hands play the organ in close-up) was ordered by Norma to
bring his things, and his overdue three months' rent has also been paid
because she thought it was
"a good idea if we are to work together." She reclines on the couch surrounded
by framed photographs of her stardom from years past, assuring him: "You'll
like it here." He realizes he is confined and trapped by the actress and her
strange past, becoming her "kept man." But he hopes to be able to finish her
script in a couple of weeks time: "Yes, I wanted the job. I wanted the dough
and I wanted to get out of there as quickly as I could."

Joe begins working on her ponderous script, but "it wasn't so simple getting
some coherence into those wild hallucinations of hers." And "she was around
all the time, hovering over me, afraid I'd do injury to that precious brainchild
of hers." She notices he has thrown out a scene from her script, and she seems
insulted: "Cut away from me?" He explains that it would be too much for the
public to see her in every scene, but having lost all sense of reality years
earlier, she insists that legions of fans are waiting anxiously for her return:

They don't? Then why do they still write me fan letters every day?
Why do they beg me for my photographs? Why? Because they want to see me, ME,
Norma Desmond. Put it back.

Resigned to her self-centeredness as she autographs fan photographs, Joe
diagnoses and pities the past star as crazy - comparing her to a sleepwalker:

I didn't argue with her. You don't yell at a sleepwalker. He may
fall and break his neck. That's it. She was still sleepwalking along the giddy
heights of a lost career - plain crazy when it came to that one subject: her
celluloid self. The great Norma Desmond! How could she breathe in that house
so crowded with Norma Desmonds? More Norma Desmonds and still more Norma Desmonds.

Two or three evenings a week after his daily 'ghost-writing'
work sessions, Max would often raise an enormous oil painting ("presented to her by some
Nevada Chamber of Commerce") from the living room wall to reveal a big screen.
Rather than go out into the harsh light of reality, they would stay at home
to watch silent movies on her private screen in her memorabilia-stuffed residence:
"The plain fact was she was afraid of that world outside. Afraid it would
remind her that time had passed." As the film flickers in a beam of light,
Joe watches film footage from Norma's past [taken from Gloria Swanson's own
disastrous uncompleted and unreleased 1929 film Queen Kelly, the last
silent film ever directed by von Stroheim himself and paid for by her lover
Joseph P. Kennedy]. While watching closely next to him ("she'd smell of tuberoses,
which is not my favorite perfume, not by a long shot"), they always view "her
pictures - that's all she wanted to see." One of the title cards from the
silent film alludes to the possessive spell cast by dreams of Hollywood success
and stardom: "...Cast out this wicked dream which has seized my heart..."

The old film star tells him about the superiority of the silent film stars
and old films:

Still wonderful, isn't it? And no dialogue. We didn't need dialogue.
We had faces. There just aren't any faces like that anymore. Maybe
one. Garbo. Oh, those idiot producers! Those imbeciles! Haven't they got any
eyes? Have they forgotten what a star looks like? (She rises to her feet in
anger, stepping into the projected spotlight) I'll show them! I'll be up there
again! So help me!

Although she is a reclusive hermit, fearful of the outside
world, she occasionally has a bridge group that visits, composed of past "actor friends" (real-life
stars Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson and H. B. Warner). Joe describes them
as "wax works" figures:

The others around the table would be actor friends, dim figures
you may still remember from the silent days. I used to think of them as her
wax works.

[Significantly, silent film star Keaton's only words in
the entire film are the two monosyllabic bids he makes on his bridge hand: "Pass"
- a bitter comment upon the rapid passage of time in Tinseltown.] While she
is in the middle of her bridge game with cheap bets offered by the morbid
players, Joe is humiliated when ordered to dump the ashtray brimming with
discarded cigarette butts. When the repo men appear at the door and threaten
to tow away his car - and after he passively witnesses his car being cranked
up in the courtyard, he realizes that his last means of escape in the car-dependent
Los Angeles has been removed: "I've lost my car." She reassures him that they
still can drive in her ornate, "hand-made" $28,000 Isotta-Fraschini touring
car, but it sits on blocks in the garage. The "old bus," a reflection
of its owner, is resurrected and brought to life: "So Max got that old
bus down off its blocks and polished it up."

Out one day riding together in her car ("upholstered in leopard skin, and
had one of those car phones, all gold-plated") that is chauffeured by Max,
they drive into "the hills above Sunset." Norma complains about Joe's unfashionable
wardrobe (and his habit of chewing gum), and steers them to an exclusive men's
clothing store, where she lavishes expensive clothes on him to smarten up
his wardrobe, including "a tuxedo and tails" for a New Year's Eve Party that
she is planning. In extreme closeup, the aggressive salesman - believing
Joe is a gigolo - speaks with a leering tilt into his ear and successively
persuades him to sell himself out for the most expensive item:

As long as the lady is paying for it, why not take the Vicuna?

Joe, both shamed and angry, is wordlessly talked into accepting an ultra-chic
overcoat rather than a cheaper, camel's hair variety.

When the heavy rains come in the last week in December ("oversized like
everything else in California"), the garage roof leaks, and Joe is reluctantly
forced to transfer into a room in the main house where Norma's three husbands
had once stayed:

Joe: Whose room is this?
Max: It was the room of the husband. Of the husbands, I should say. Madame
has been married three times.

After asking Max why there are no locks on any of the doors,
Joe is told that Norma's doctor suggested that there be no locks, no sleeping
pills or razor blades in the house, or gas in her bedroom, because she
has spells and
"moments of melancholy" and has attempted suicide. He wonders why:

Joe: Her career? She got enough out of it. She's not forgotten.
She still gets those fan letters.
Max (hinting): I wouldn't look too closely at the postmarks.
Joe (guessing): You send them. Is that it, Max?

Max has been forging her letters for years, deluding Norma even further.
He feels pity for Norma, her victimization resulting from living in the past.
In her ornate bedroom on that gloomy, rainy day, Joe comments that it looks
like a set for a silent movie star:

There it was again - that room of hers, all satin and ruffles. And
that bed, like a gilded rowboat. The perfect setting for a silent movie queen.
Poor devil - still waving proudly to a parade which had long since passed
her by.

Norma has planned a New Year's party and Joe descends the
staircase, dressed in the new tuxedo she has purchased for him. He is shocked
to learn - a "sad,
embarrassing revelation" - that he is the only guest for the grandly
bizarre occasion, with a full banquet spread of champagne and a cake. He
divulges that his elegant tailcoat is "all padding - don't let it fool you." She intends
to passionately seduce him to the tango twenties music of the four-person
orchestra on the slippery, waxed ballroom dance floor. As they prepare to
dance, she reminds him of faded memories from the past: "You know, this floor
used to be wood, but I had it changed. Valentino said, 'there's nothing like
tile for a tango.'" When it reaches 11:15, and she gets slightly drunk, he
feels "caught like the cigarette in that contraption on her finger." She
promises to fill the pool, open her oceanfront house in Malibu, and buy him
a boat and sail to Hawaii. She further lavishes him with a leather box containing
a matched gold cigarette case and lighter, bragging:

I'm rich. I'm richer than all this new Hollywood trash. I've got
a million dollars...I own three blocks downtown. I've got oil in Bakersfield,
pumping, pumping, pumping. What's it for but to buy us anything we want.

Joe stands up to protest and questions her attitude toward
him: "What right
do you have to take me for granted?...Has it ever occurred to you that I may
have a life of my own. That there may be some girl that I'm crazy about...What
I'm trying to say is that I'm all wrong for you. You want a Valentino, somebody
with polo ponies, a big shot." She senses what he is trying to say and rises
menacingly: "What you're trying to say is that you don't want me to love you.
Say it. Say it." And then she slaps him hard across the face, and leaves
the party to ascend the stairs to her bedroom. The camera slowly follows
her into her bedroom as she slams the door behind her - it moves toward the
hollowed-out lock hole. The four-piece orchestra of musicians continues playing
without missing a beat.

Joe retrieves his Vicuna overcoat from the front hallway closet, opens the
gated front door and decides to leave. He clumsily catches his long gold key
chain on the door handle - symbolic of his cumulative, umbilical-cord dependence
upon Norma:

I didn't know where I was going. I just had to get out of there.
I had to be with people my own age. I had to hear somebody laugh again.

Without his own car, he thumbs a ride to town and attends
a noisy, crowded, boisterous party ("New Year's shindig") given by his assistant director friend
Artie Green (Jack Webb) in Las Palmas for "writers without a job, composers
without a publisher, actresses so young they still believed the guys in the
casting offices. A bunch of kids who didn't give a hoot, just so long as they
had a yuck to share." He is relieved to find the apartment jam-packed with
people happy and celebratory, and explains how he has been "in a deep freeze"
- a portent of his own death. Artie was ready to report him to the Bureau
of Missing Persons - "the well-known screenwriter, uranium smuggler and Black
Dahlia suspect."

[The reference is to the notorious, unsolved Black Dahlia
murder case of Elizabeth Short, a 22 year-old aspiring actress known as
the 'Black Dahlia' because of her black hair and attire. She was murdered
in January, 1947, found cut in half and nude in a vacant lot near Hollywood.
The film makes a connection to Joe's own brutal, gruesome, sensationalized
murder in the show-biz town. It must be surmised that the close proximity
of the 1947 Dahlia case to the 1950 film had an impact on the film's script.]

As a favor, Joe asks Artie if he can stay for a few weeks
- his friend offers
"a vacancy on the couch." Then he re-encounters script reader Betty, learning
that she is Artie's girlfriend. They start to talk about his rejected script
and "hurt feelings." Feeling guilty after their meeting in Sheldrake's office,
she tells him that she's been hoping to run into him again. He wonders sarcastically:
"What for? To recover that knife you stuck in my back?" During their "shop
talk," they retreat to Artie's bathroom (the "Rainbow Room") to discuss one
of his old scripts (Dark Windows). It has six pages of a flashback
courtroom scene that she believes is "true," "moving," and "worthwhile." Although
both of them have other lovers, he begins to seduce her with a put-on melodramatic
tone when asked if he is hungry: "Hungry? After twelve years in the Burmese
jungle, I'm starving Lady Agatha, starving for a white shoulder" and as he
moves closer for a kiss - "thirsting for the coolness of your lips." In character,
she trades platitudes with him in a parody of trashy romances: "No, Phillip,
no, we must be strong. You're still wearing the uniform of the Coldstream
Guards." He is interrupted when the phone becomes free, and promises an awaiting
Betty that he will return - she replies: "With a wildly beating heart."

In a phone call to the mansion, he requests that Max start
packing his belongings in his luggage, but the butler solemnly replies
that he has no time, because a doctor is there attending to "Madame," who
has attempted to commit suicide by cutting her wrists with a razor from
his room. Feeling pity (and guilt), Joe is stunned - he bolts from the
room and leaves a bewildered Betty (without explanation) and returns to
the Sunset Boulevard mansion. When he arrives by cab, the musicians are
still playing as if nothing has happened and the doctor is leaving. He
finds Norma in her bedroom with bandages on both wrists - attempting to
regain her control over him. After he removes her shoes, she tells him
that it was idiotic for her to fall in love with him. Joe imagines what
her headlines would have been if she had been successful - not realizing
that he will soon be the subject of a sensational headline himself:

Joe: What kind of a silly thing was that to do?
Norma: To fall in love with you - that was the idiotic thing.
Joe: It sure would have made attractive headlines - GREAT STAR KILLS HERSELF
FOR UNKNOWN WRITER. [Or rephrased: GREAT STAR KILLS UNKNOWN WRITER!]
Norma: Great stars have great pride.

He attempts to comfort Norma, telling her that he only made up what he said
about having a girl friend because he felt they were wrong together. And he
thanks her:

You've been good to me. You're the only person in this stinking
town that has been good to me.

He dares her as she sobs uncontrollably to "promise to act like a sensible
human being." As the musicians are heard playing "Auld Lang Syne" around midnight,
Joe goes to her bed side and wishes her: "Happy New Year." She replies: "Happy
New Year, darling," and embraces him by wrapping her clutching arms (more
like clutching talons) around his neck and pulling him downward toward her,
as the screen goes black. Caught in her pathos, he is enveloped by her grasping,
entrapping hands - and decides to remain with her as her bought lover.

Some unknown time later from her reader's office, Betty
desperately tries to get through on the phone to Joe at Crestview 5-1733,
but Max intercepts and blocks her calls, giving the alibi that the calls
are inquiries for "a
stray dog!" [An apt description of Joe's position.] Wearing a leopard-skin
covering (and matching shoes), Norma is sitting on an outside chaise lounge
next to the pool (now filled with water), watching Joe swim (in leopard-patterned
bathing trunks! - the same as her own upholstered car). Believing that the
astrological signs ("today is the day of the greatest conjunction")
are positive, she asks Max to get the car ready to deliver her rewritten "Salome"
script in person to director Cecil B. De Mille at Paramount - a great director
who always said she "was his greatest star." She begrudgingly admits that
his accolade was quite a few years ago, but she chirps (as she dries his
back and wraps him - around the neck - with a towel):

I never looked better in my life. You know why? Because I've
never been as happy in my life.

As time passes, Joe passively accepts her instruction: "She'd taught me
how to play bridge by then, just as she'd taught me some fancy tango steps,
and what wine to drink with what fish." During one evening's chauffeured ride
to a bridge game, Joe stops the car to buy foreign-brand cigarettes for Norma,
and encounters Artie and Betty in Schwab's Pharmacy. Symbolically playing
a gangster hitman to gun down his romantic rival, Artie riddles Gillis' body
with bullets from his finger pistol (with sound effects). Miss Schaefer is
excited and thrilled to see him: "Where have you been keeping yourself? I've
got the most wonderful news for you!" She informs him that Sheldrake likes
his Dark Windows script and thinks it could be made into something.
With "half-sold" studio interest, she ambitiously believes that there is the
distant possibility of collaborating as scriptwriters on the "springboard"
of his idea, because she doesn't want to be a reader her whole life. But Joe
flatly turns her down and crushes her encouragement: "I've given up writing
on spec...As a matter of fact, I've given up writing altogether." Ambitious
to get a start in Hollywood, she is angry to be denied an opportunity to
acquire his help as a writer - as Norma had done:

Joe: Thanks anyway, for your interest in my career.
Betty: It's not your career, it's mine. I kinda hoped to get in on
this deal. I don't want to be a reader all my life. I want to write!

Back at the mansion, when Norma suspects Joe is getting
bored and glum, she playfully entertains him with a "live show" - "the Norma Desmond Follies"
imitating a Mack Sennett Bathing Beauty [recalling one of her first screen
appearances]:

I can still see myself in the line: Marie Prevost, Mabel Normand...Mabel
was always stepping on my feet...

With another reminder of the silent film era, as she transforms herself
into Charlie Chaplin as The Tramp (with black mustache, derby hat, and cane),
he ponders Betty's ambitions as a newbie Hollywood screenwriter:

She was so like all us writers when we first hit Hollywood, itching
with ambition, panting to get your names up there: Screenplay by. Original
Story by. Hmph! Audiences don't know somebody sits down and writes
a picture. They think the actors make it up as they go along.

During her Tramp routine, Norma is interrupted with a phone
call from Paramount Studios, but it is not her silent movie mentor (director
Cecil B. De Mille playing himself) but Gordon Cole - so she refuses to
talk. She is deluded into believing that De Mille will naturally produce
her triumphant comeback movie, after making twelve pictures together - "his greatest successes." She
threatens to wait him out: "I've waited 20 years for this call. Now De Mille
can wait till I'm good and ready." About three days later, Norma is good and
ready, and there are more "urgent calls" from Paramount - though the calls
are not what she thinks. So with "about half a pound of makeup," she commissions
Max to drive her in person to the Paramount Pictures studio and offices.

At the main studio gate, Norma brags to the young, unmannered,
naive guard:
"...without me, you wouldn't have any job, because without me, there wouldn't
be any Paramount Studios." De Mille, on sound stage 18 where he is shooting Samson and Delilah (1949) in
jodhpurs and boots, is informed through a succession of assistants, that
Norma (who "must be a million years old")
is on her way. The great director reacts with some sympathy for her as a destroyed
victim of Hollywood's sound revolution, knowing that her youthful stardom
was ruined by press agents "working overtime" as she aged:

De Mille: I hate to think where that puts me. I could be her father...(perplexed)
It must be about that awful script of hers. What can I tell her, hmm? What
can I say?
First Assistant: I could tell you're all tied up in the projection room. I
can give her the brush.
De Mille: Thirty million fans have given her the brush. Isn't that enough?...You
didn't know Norma Desmond as a lovely little girl of seventeen, with more
courage and wit and heart than ever came together in one youngster.
First Assistant: I understand she was a terror to work with.
De Mille: Only toward the end. You know, a dozen press agents working overtime
can do terrible things to the human spirit.

Pioneering Hollywood director De Mille greets her at the
sound stage door when she arrives in the limousine: "Well, hello, young fellow...It's good
to see you," and they embrace. ['Young fellow' was De Mille's actual nickname
for star Gloria Swanson.] She is deluded into believing that the filming of
her screenplay will begin soon, because she has been called ten times. He
invites her to sit in his official "C B De Mille" chair and get comfortable
while he goes to find the real reason for all the calls from Gordon Cole.
As Norma sits in his chair in one of the film's most poignant scenes, a sound
boom microphone (a symbol of the sound era and Hollywood progress) annoyingly
brushes the feather on her old-fashioned, veiled hat. Symbolically victimized
on the sound set because of her obsolescence, she pushes it away in disgust.
A spotlight is focused on her by Hog-Eye, an electrician in the scaffolding
who was one of her old stagehand acquaintances. A crowd of fans (composed
of technicians and extras) gathers to admire and pay homage to the age-old
celebrity illuminated in the shaft of blinding light - as in her glory days.

Meanwhile, De Mille learns from Gordon Cole in the Property
Department that the studio is, in reality, only interested in borrowing
and renting her exotic, leopard-skin Isotta-Faschini antique car for a
few weeks for a Crosby/Hope road picture. De Mille is faced with having
to explain the mix-up on the phone calls she received. When he returns
to the set, he authoritatively commands Hog-Eye to move the spotlight off
Norma: "Turn that light back where it belongs."
Troubled, he can't face telling her that he can't make her film - and put
the retired star in the spotlight again. She is emotionally moved by the
experience of returning to the studio and she begins to cry:

Norma: Did you see them? Did you see how they came?
De Mille: You know, crazy things happen in this business, Norma. I hope you
haven't lost your sense of humor. (Norma sobs) What's the matter, dear?
Norma: Nothing. I just didn't realize what it would be like to come back to
the old studio. I had no idea how much I'd missed it.
De Mille: We missed you too, dear.
Norma: We'll be working again, won't we, Chief? We'll make our greatest picture.

Powerless, De Mille asserts that her picture would be very
expensive and almost impossible to make, but Norma urges that she only
wants to recapture her arrested stardom: "I just want to work again. You don't know what it means
to know that you want me." When filming resumes on the set, she sits and watches
from the sidelines after being advised by De Mille that the parade has passed
her by: "Pictures have changed quite a bit."

As Joe waits in the limousine outside the sound stage with Max, the butler
explains that the whole row of offices in the building across from the stage
was where Norma's dressing room used to be, and his office was where the script
Readers' Department is now located. The words 'Readers' Department' ignites
an old memory, and Joe hears footsteps - he spots Betty walking along the
second-floor balcony toward her office, and goes up to greet her. They immediately
pick up their previous conversation about his Dark Windows script
- one that features a troubled soul. He unselfishly suggests: "It's all yours."

It's no good to me anyway. Help yourself...If you get a hundred
thousand for it, you buy me a box of chocolate creams. If you get an Oscar,
I get the left foot.

She eagerly wants him to work with her on his script ("I'm just not good
enough to do it all by myself"), believing that they should write the screenplay
together. Joe wants to retain the psychological angle: "Psychopaths sell like
hot cakes." As the limousine's horn sounds from below, Joe is caught between
two demands: "Couldn't we work in the evenings? Six o'clock in the morning?
This next month I'm completely at your disposal. Artie's out of town...I'm
free every evening and every weekend." Although her newly-engaged fiancee
Artie ("you couldn't find a nicer guy") is on location in Arizona shooting
a Western, Betty shows an interest in Joe beyond the script - but he puts
her off again: "Now stop being chicken-hearted and write that story." However,
as he rushes off, he recommends an angle for the story:

And don't make it too dreary. How about this for a situation? She
teaches daytimes, he teaches at night, right?...They don't even know each
other but they share the same room. It's cheaper that way. As a matter of
fact, they sleep in the same bed - in shifts, of course.

Appearing optimistic and hopeful, Norma leaves through the
sound stage door and is kissed goodbye by De Mille. He gives her a gentle
brush-off - his final words to her are that they can possibly work something
out: "We'll see what
we can do" - he doesn't want to hurt Norma's feelings, but she misinterprets
his response. As she drives away, he tells his First Assistant to cancel the
studio's request for Norma's car. He expresses his basic decency by ordering
that she should never know the reason for the phone call. Deluded into believing
that she will be filming soon in a triumphant return with "the old team together,"
a vain Norma prepares vigorously to be in a starring role.